At the start of the last decade,
Mandy Moore began working on her seventh album with her then-husband
Ryan Adams. It never materialized. Moore said that she and Adams wrote songs together that Adams never scheduled the studio time to record. He allegedly prevented her from trying to hire other producers to help complete the album, and would tell her she wasn’t a real musician because she couldn’t play an instrument. She didn’t finish the record, and her music career stalled out; she was writing, she was working, yet nothing was happening. The years got swallowed up. Moore and Adams divorced in 2016, and that year she joined the cast of the time-jumping romantic drama
This is Us. As the show’s success grew astronomically, Moore’s music seemed to shrink to an equally distant point in the rearview mirror.
Where do our past selves go? How can we possibly start all over again, when so much time has passed and the world around us has warped out of recognition? These are the questions that stir like dust through the air of Moore’s seventh album and first in almost 11 years,
Silver Landings. She abandoned the material she wrote with Adams and instead co-wrote every song on the record with
Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, whom she married in 2018. She also brought back producer Mike Viola, who helmed her previous album, 2009’s
Amanda Leigh. Surrounding herself with this adopted musical family gives the album a feeling of domestic warmth and security. But Moore’s lyrics speak from a shakier place; she can’t experience the security of the present moment without also seeing it crash into the insecurity of the next.
That’s where the album’s lead single, “When I Wasn’t Watching,” finds her. “Where was I when this was going down?” Moore sighs. “Maybe sleeping in/Maybe out of town.” Potential lives she could’ve lived flicker across her mind: “How do I start to retrace the steps I haven’t even taken yet?” Moore captures this stranded, disembodied feeling with remarkable economy and clarity, and the music sounds as brimming with shadow-selves as she is. “My favorite version of me disappeared/Through longer days and shorter years”—If she’s not singing or acting, Moore seems to ask, if instead she remains anchored forever to the current second, who, or what, is left over?
If there’s a shared theme among the songs on
Silver Landings, it’s who you become when the life around you falls apart and you have to build a new one from the ruins of the last. She never focuses on the damage directly, but instead on the first, tentative steps one takes afterwards, when at any minute it feels like the ground might crumble away beneath you. “Easy Target,” co-written with former
Death Cab for Cutie member Chris Walla, could be a sequel to “When I Wasn’t Watching” even though it precedes it in the track list, Moore trying to reenter the world with all of her vulnerability intact. “Through all of the noise,” she sings, “going out on a limb again,” the instruments glittering around her as they would in a
Fleetwood Mac song.
The whole album kind of sounds like Fleetwood Mac, or at least descended from the same 1970s Los Angeles studios that incubated similarly crisp records by
Jackson Browne and The Eagles, glassy marbles of sound with storm clouds of color swirling inside. Guitars ripple, organs pour into the ear. The kick drum is a soft implosion. The recording is so clear you can hear acoustic guitar strings creak like door hinges as fingers shift around on them in “Forgiveness,” the closest the record comes to expressing bitterness. “I wanted to be good enough for you,” she sings, “until it wasn’t good enough for me.” The song moves patiently beneath her as her resentment slowly thickens over four minutes.
But just as the past has a way of clarifying the degree to which someone hurt you, it can make your feelings toward other parts of your life more tangled and unfocused. On “Fifteen,” Moore attempts to survey the early teen-pop career she gradually left behind. When she debuted in 1999 with the single “Candy,” Moore entered the teen-pop cosmos alongside
Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and
Christina Aguilera. Her life changed very rapidly. “Missed prom/Missed graduation/No college in the fall,” she sings—as if she both longs for and can’t imagine having the normal life she didn’t get to live—“On the road with a boy band singing for the people in the mall.” The deadpan quality of these details would come off as cynical and embarrassed about this phase in her life if she didn’t also seem to feel affection for her own naivete: “No regrets, with a few exceptions/Every wrong turn was the right direction.” If anything “Fifteen” embodies the true purpose of Moore’s new music: to extend her hand backwards through time to love and forgive herself.
